The present disclosure herein relates to a system on chip, and more particularly, to a system on chip having an interrupt proxy function and an interrupt processing method thereof.
A variety of information devices used in digital communication systems or multimedia systems are being reduced in size, weight and price while improved in performance according to users' demands. Consequently, a system on chip (SoC) technology is becoming more significant.
The SoC is a semiconductor integration circuit in which functions of various semiconductor products having separate markets and product groups, such as a processor, a memory, an analog circuit, and a digital signal processor (DSP), are integrated on one chip. Therefore, the SoC includes a plurality of modularized intellectual properties (IPs). The IPs include all hardware and software functions constituting a system, such as a memory, an external interface, analog and hybrid mode blocks, built-in software, and an operating system (OS). The IP may be referred to as a virtual component (VC) in the field of the art.
When interrupt signals are generated in the respective IPs of the SoC, a processor core collects all the interrupt signals generated in the IPs and processes interrupt tasks using different user software according to the IPs.
In this case, since different IPs may take different times in processing the interrupt tasks, the overall performance of the SoC may be deteriorated. Also, the system may malfunction due to an error occurring in the user software. In case that a system structure is complicated due to an increase of IPs, a waiting time may increase due to a difference in time for the processor core to make access to the respective IPs. When the interrupt task processing is thus delayed, an error may occur in which the high-speed processor core performs an interrupt service routine of the user software again.